ProScenia Design

A New-Play Fest Stands Alone The Contemporary American Theater Festival is now the only U.S. gathering of its kind that fully stages all its offerings—and that matters more now.

An Unbuilt Life, by Elizabeth DeSchruyver. Dir: Steven Carpenter, with Susan Holliday, JC Payne, and David Bryan Jackson. Costumes by Sigrid Johannesdottir, Lighting by Marianne Meadows, and sound by David Bryan Jackson.

When Steven and I first discussed this production, it had an entirely different look (period, even, but that's a different story); then, one day, he texted me a photo of a singular set of very distinctive firniture, and we both said, "yes, that's it!"...

Two redesigns later (and, as it happened, a whole set of furniture later), An Unbuilt Life had a distinctive life of its own. One of the challenges of The Undercroft Theatre, from a design standpoint, is that there are only so many directions one can go. But like designing for Beckett, with his vehement constraints, sometimes the binding sets you free. Kudos to the shop staff on this one: nobody expected that SL wall to flip around - snd certainly not as smoothly as it did…

(Special thanks to Elizabeth Jenkins McFadden, who stood in as emergency back up designer when I was supposed to be getting surgery…)

Arms And The Man - Washington Stage Guild - How to squeeze Shaw's three locations in time and space onto the stage of the Undercroft while paying heed to his (and director Michael Rothhaar's) seeming demand for a degree of representative specificity? God bless Matty Griffiths, who supervised the build (while playing Paul) Megan Holden, who led a veritable corps of scenic artists, and especially SM Arthur Nordlie, who got the changes down to around 12.5 minutes between acts...